


The Absence of a Damn

by BeastOfTheSea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark Harry, Dobby - Freeform, Gen, Goblins, Grey Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 10:26:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4621821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeastOfTheSea/pseuds/BeastOfTheSea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's remarkable how easy everything is when you lose the power to care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Absence of a Damn

**Author's Note:**

> Banged out on a whim while I was feeling somewhat apathetic. I realize there may be plot holes. This oneshot took turns I did not anticipate while I was writing it, and I didn't go over it carefully to iron unevenness out. 
> 
> I imagine this taking place roughly in the place of canon sixth year.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Inspired by the following quote from Paradise Lost:
> 
> _So farewell, hope; and with hope farewell, fear;  
>  Farewell, remorse! all good to me is lost_

One fair day, Harry stopped giving a damn.

After that, everything was easy.

The Aurors were laughable fools, and deeply corrupt; an Imperius here, a bribe with funds drawn from the Potter vaults here, and he arranged for there to never be... _interference_ when he needed it.

The Purebloods holed up well in their manors, but they had forgotten to protect themselves properly when they walked in public. Death Eaters found their own hit-and-run tactics turned against them. Apparition, Portkeys, and Floo travel could all be tracked reliably with the proper methods. A wizard hidden under an Invisibility Cloak, using a rogue House-Elf for transport, was much more evasive. Oh, of course there was public outcry, but the absence of morality made that merely bothersome and a cause for caution. After all, it wasn't as though the perpetrator let himself be known. Once he began getting serious, he left clues pointing at one faction or another and watched in amusement. Sometimes, deceived Dark wizards even did away with each other.

But he did not limit himself to the Dark; in disgust, he also exposed the vigilantes known as the Order of the Phoenix. They accomplished little and caused themselves much harm - he considered it a mercy mission as much as anything else. The sabotage of their organization discouraged new recruits and encouraged the old to give up on Dumbledore's schemes. A fantastic result, if he had to be frank.

The Ministry exploded. Not literally - he had no desire to harm innocent workers who were just trying to pay their rent, much less the few lunatics who had aspirations of reforming the place. But its security was poor, and "secret" files soon found their way into public view. Fudge was forced to resign in the face of stark evidence of the most ludicrous corruption; his successor came to office campaigning on a platform of reform, honesty, and transparency, and was forced to resign a few months later as his own bribes came to light. He had to be given credit, however: he hid his corruption _slightly_ better than Fudge had. Had he shared his predecessor's competence, he might have been forced to resign within weeks.

Dumbledore never suspected who was behind it all. Harry laughed long and loud, for the first time in over a year, when he discovered that Dumbledore's chief suspect had been _Aberforth_. Evidently the old liar had not been able to comprehend that anyone else could be as crafty and seemingly-innocent as himself. Harry had not even had to put on a good show of Occulumency: he had only presented to the world his own total apathy, and those who had attempted to probe his mind had turned away in disgust. He knew for a fact (Dumbledore cast _Hominum Revelio_ as a matter of course before important conversations, but had never stopped to think that a House-Elf was not a _man_ ) that Snape had reported that "Potter knows nothing, does nothing, cares for nothing" - but that sallow, sullen man had not grasped that a wizard who cared for nothing could act with impunity. So it was quite easy to exit a Potions class while drifting through a haze of apathy, take a brief detour to arrange for an already-Marked seventh-year to have an unpleasant accident, and then wander off to the library in a renewed haze. 

The Horcruxes took some more investigation, but it was amazing what one could accomplish when one brought one's full force of will to bear on what was, after all, a fragment of a fragment of a soul. He hadn't even meant to do it, initially; he had meant only to mangle his end of the connection between himself and Voldemort into something that would serve his purposes, no matter how much damage it did to a self he no longer valued, and found that he'd scored an unimagined jackpot. An alliance of convenience with Kreacher later, a visit to Gringotts (and the mysterious disappearance of several Goblin-made artifacts from Hogwarts) later, and a trip down to the Chamber later... Well, he found it truly remarkable that Voldemort never noticed, but he took it simply as another chunk of the meaninglessness of endeavor. If only Dumbledore had been serious, he might have managed long ago.

By the time he had finished, his scar had grown far more ugly, but he didn't mind. Makeup made the hideous blackened mark on his forehead seem like the innocuous lightning-bolt scar again for a little while, and all was well. Admittedly he hadn't liked the screaming in his head as the basilisk fang scraped along the jagged line, but it was funny - since the Horcrux was separate from him, poisoning it had not hurt him. It had only left him with the sort of unfathomable agony appropriate to unlicensed surgery on the self with a blunt scalpel. That had worn off after a day lying on the floor of the Chamber, however, and he'd bought everyone off with an excuse about staying up too late training in the Room of Requirement. Oh, a few fingers were wagged at him, but he didn't care any more. He had gone beyond even being bored and annoyed that anyone expected him to care.

Events wound down to their conclusion, and Harry did not even give enough of a damn to show up to the "final battle". Instead, he spent the week beforehand working out a complicated arrangement with the goblins, which boiled down to his agreeing to bluff and take the credit if they raided Malfoy Manor and carried off everything upon which they could lay their grasping claws. After all, once the manor had been burned to the ground, no one could truly guess what had been taken. As collateral, he offered the basilisk corpse and all the venom still contained within it; with the Horcruxes save Nagini destroyed, he had no further use for it. He threw in some rubbish from the Potter vault, which his ancestors had probably valued but he did not - between cold hard cash and the favor of a sadistic, ravenous race whom wizards refused to take seriously, he was set for life - and the deal was sealed.

In a twist of delicious irony, he had researched the anti-Apparition, anti-Portkey, anti-Floo spells that most likely had been used to keep his parents from fleeing Godric's Hollow in Halloween 1981, then had the goblins specifically set up those around Malfoy Manor. He doubted Voldemort had appreciated it. Then again, a man could appreciate very little while being hacked to pieces, along with his pet snake, by basilisk-venom-laced falchions. Pity.

As agreed, Harry had taken credit for both the fame and the guilt - and then disappeared. The Ministry was too much in shambles to really search for him, the few remaining Dark wizards were huddling together for warmth (while privately planning to stab each other before they themselves could be stabbed), and Dumbledore had come down with a terrible case of being exposed as an old fool with a vast amount of scandal in his past. (The constantly-replenishing liquid-nitrogen bath needed to keep Fawkes neutralized had been very tricky to set up, but was more than worth it. Commissioning Fred and George on that private project had been worth every Galleon.) Harry really did not give enough of a damn to learn a foreign language, but the United States was a very large place with a thoroughly confused and decentralized magical government. Even had the Ministry been in any shape to pursue, he could have stayed one state ahead of them for a long, long time.

He distantly regretted leaving behind those he knew, but he had become detached from them. He recognized that he wasn't really the sort to have friends, and that Ron and Hermione had fallen in with him through chance and circumstance; as they grew older, they grew apart, and his apathy let him accept that with only a moment of thought. Ultimately, he was the freak the Dursleys had called him, if because of the whims of fate rather than because of any inherent quality of his own; once he had accepted that as an abstract quality, he had behaved in such a way as to bring it into concrete reality. In England, he could never be anything other than that.

Abroad, however? He was a loner with an irrelevant past, a disturbingly quick wand-hand, the favor of the goblin people, a friendly Free Elf, and enough money to last him for the rest of his life if he didn't squander it. And he had no desire to do so - all the riches of the world rang hollow, and he cared only to have food on the table and a roof over his head.

Had he acted for the sake of others? Frankly not; they had demanded too much for too long. Had he acted for his own sake? Not truly; he did not regard "Harry" as anything other than the mere fact of existence.

But if he would not die, then he needed to endure living, and three things had made his life intolerable - Voldemort's ambitions, the Ministry's persecutions, and Dumbledore's machinations. He had acted, curtly and without concern for goodness, to put a stop to those things which demanded he _care_ about his day-to-day existence.

With those brought to ruin, he could at last be nothing more than himself. He desired nothing more.

The Sorting Hat who had once seen a spark in him that would have been worthy of the House of ambition would have wept to see the ashes that remained.

But he did not give a damn.

**Author's Note:**

> The explanation for why Harry went to all this trouble is spiritually somewhat borrowed from Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Was Too Lazy To Fail". (The story begins [here](http://www.rulit.me/books/time-enough-for-love-read-151200-17.html) \- scroll down to near the bottom and start reading. An ingenious and interesting tale...)


End file.
